Leslie then gossiped to them of the many changes in London. These are now very ancient history to a whole nation. But at that time (in September, Nineteen-fourteen) they sounded still strange enough to those who lived out of town.
She spoke of the darkened streets. The bright, purposely-misleading lights in the Park. Of the recruiting posters; the recruiting results. Of the first of the refugees. Leslie's old lady had given hospitality to two ladies, a mother and a daughter from Brussels, and it was Leslie's new duty to translate English to them. Also of the departure of regiments she talked....
"Of course there are only two classes into which you can divide the young men who aren't getting ready to go out," decreed Leslie, the whole-hearted. "Either they're Objects of Pity, or else they're Objects of Contempt."
"Come, come!" put in the Aeroplane Lady, laughing a little, but without raising her eyes from the stretched canvas on the trestles before her. "What about my men outside there?"
"I bet they envy the rawest recruit in K.'s Army!" declared Leslie. "The most anæmic little plucky shop-assistant who's only just scraped through on his chest-measurement and who's never spent so many consecutive hours in the open air in his whole life before!" She patted the stately head of the Great Dane as he stepped up to her from his big wooden kennel in the corner, and went on to say how she loved the New Armies.
"We see plenty of their doings up at Hampstead now, Taffy," she said. "'The Heath has Armies plenty, and semi-warlike bands!' Queen's Westminsters coming up in sweaters and shorts to do Physical Ekkers on the cricket-pitch. Swagger young men, some of them, too. Driving up in cars. Wearing their Jermyn Street winter-sports kit of last year under common privates' overcoats."
"Mars in motley!" said the Aeroplane Lady.
Leslie said, "It is a mixture! New Army Type Number One, Section A: the boy who was born to be a soldier and bred to be a clerk. The fighter who wouldn't have got a chance to live if it hadn't been for this war. The Dear Duck who's being taken to the water for the first time after twenty years!... Then, of course, there's the New Army Type Number Forty-three: the Honest Striver in Khaki, putting his back into learning a job that wasn't ever meant to be his. Not one bit thrilled by the idea of a scrap. No fun to him. Civilian down to his bones. But—'It is his duty, and he does.'"
"All the more credit," the Aeroplane Lady reminded her quietly, "to the born civilian."
"Yes, I know, Mrs. Crewe. One thoroughly respects him for it," agreed the soldier's daughter warmly.